ScienceBlogs Select

Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: more religion and child abuse [Effect Measure]

revere none@example.com — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 06:24:55 -0500

Richard Dawkins has taken a lot of abuse himself for having the temerity to suggest that some kinds of religious upbringings can be considered abusive even if no physical harm is involved. We know that Catholic children suffered abuse at the hands of priests and nuns, and that some fundamentalist Christians have also engaged in extremely abusive practices. We don't usually think of Jews as routinely engaging in this, but there is something non-sectarian about the fundamentalist mindset. You could do a 'global search and replace' and this sad tale of escape from orthodox Judaism could be interchanged with those of many evangelical Christian or Muslim sects. I have no trouble calling this institutionalized child abuse:

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And so, driven on ceaselessly toward new shores [Tomorrow's Table]

Pamela Ronald none@example.com — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 16:33:57 -0500

I am traveling now far away from home towards a large lake in Zurich. What a perfect time to receive this poem from Jan Visser.

Le Lac (written in 1820 by Alphonse de Lamartine)

Ainsi, toujours poussés vers de nouveaux rivages,
dans la nuit éternelle emportés sans retour,
ne pourrons-nous jamais sur l'océan des âges
jeter l'ancre un seul jour?

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Flood tolerant rice soon to be released to Bangladeshi farmers [Tomorrow's Table]

Pamela Ronald none@example.com — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 15:08:05 -0500

The Daily Star of Dhaka reports today that flood-tolerant rice will soon be officially released in Bangladesh.

The flood-tolerant rice varieties (called Sub1- rice) can help farmers, many who live on less than $1/day, dramatically increase yield during floods.

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Happy Carl Sagan Day! [The Primate Diaries]

Eric Michael Johnson none@example.com — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 14:25:12 -0800

His birthday is actually on Monday, but today marks the first annual event initiated by Broward College in Florida. In honor of the event, here is Carl Sagan's final interview prior to his death. Amazing isn't it that the science vs. religion debate hasn't changed much after 15 years. But it must be the atheists that are to blame!

You may be interested in my earlier post discussing Carl Sagan's principled stance on nuclear winter that I wrote to accompany Seed magazine's interview with biologist Paul Ehrlich.

Think big thoughts today and take Sagan's message of skepticism and humble awe of the universe with you.

[Video below the fold.]

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Jim Hall: Transitions in an open source software project [Collective Imagination]

Greg Laden none@example.com — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 11:19:58 -0500

This is the third of four guest posts by software and system engineer, and former maintainer of freeDOS, James Hall.

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What does not kill the group, makes it stronger! [Gene Expression]

Razib Khan none@example.com — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 08:34:19 -0500

I recently finished reading The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures, a new book by Nicholas Wade, a science writer for The New York Times. Before giving it the "full treatment" I thought it behooved me to revisit some of the scientific literature which Wade relies upon to give form to his argument. One of the pillars of The Faith Instinct is group selection, and one of the scholars who Wade specifically cites is the economist Samuel Bowles. Bowles was an author on a paper I reviewed earlier this week, on the empirical assessment of the extent of heritability of wealth across generations in various societies. But in this case what is more relevant was a paper that Bowles published in Science last spring, Did Warfare Among Ancestral Hunter-Gatherers Affect the Evolution of Human Social Behaviors?:

Since Darwin, intergroup hostilities have figured prominently in explanations of the evolution of human social behavior. Yet whether ancestral humans were largely "peaceful" or "warlike" remains controversial. I ask a more precise question: If more cooperative groups were more likely to prevail in conflicts with other groups, was the level of intergroup violence sufficient to influence the evolution of human social behavior? Using a model of the evolutionary impact of between-group competition and a new data set that combines archaeological evidence on causes of death during the Late Pleistocene and early Holocene with ethnographic and historical reports on hunter-gatherer populations, I find that the estimated level of mortality in intergroup conflicts would have had substantial effects, allowing the proliferation of group-beneficial behaviors that were quite costly to the individual altruist.

The thesis presented in this paper is essential to The Faith Instinct because a central assertion in that book is that religious behavior emerged as an evolved trait in the context of intergroup competition. In short, war among hunter-gatherers. But let us set aside the relatively controversial issue of the evolution of religion, and focus on group selection among humans, and its possible role in the emergence of the trait of altruism.

David Sloan Wilson, who just recently joined ScienceBlogs, has written extensively on the topic of group selection (or, multilevel selection, though I will use the term group selection because that is what Bowles uses). It is a controversial topic in the context of evolutionary biology. The short sketch is that naive variants of group selection were in vogue until the 1960s, when a new wave of theorists tore down its theoretical basis and offered up alternative processes to explain social behavior. In more recent years David Sloan Wilson has been leading a campaign to return group selection, or more generally multilevel selection, to respectability. Others have always "kept the faith," but only begun to speak up more forcefully in its defense recently. Why only recently? In part because skeptics of selection above the level of the individual have always assented to its theoretical possibility, but diminished the likelihood of its realized probability. With the fleshing out of some empirical data which makes that probability more than speculation, the theoretical window for group selection may translate into something more substantive.

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Barbara Ehrenreich on the swine flu supply problem [Effect Measure]

revere none@example.com — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 06:46:09 -0500

I first read Barbara Ehrenreich in 1971 when she wrote The American Health Empire: Power, Profits, and Politics with her (then) husband John Ehrenreich (Health PAC, 1971). She was by then a PhD in cell biology (Rockefeller University) and anti-war activist. We traveled in the same circles and I knew her slightly at the time. Her next book, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (with Deirdre English) was a new reading of women in medical history. It was an influential text in the emerging women's health movement. Since then she has published many books, several making the best seller lists and throughout an astute and still influential observer. Now she has penned a brief comment on the the alleged swine flu vaccine supply problem and who's to blame. And I find myself in complete agreement with her:

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A matter of Life and er... Matter [The Scientific Indian]

Selva none@example.com — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 01:38:45 -0500

As I was stuffing my face today, I wondered if the Universe cared. The short answer is no. The slightly longer and more depressing answer is: my existence is more marginal than a speck of stray DNA on a grain of sand staring at vast oceans (that's literally true, oh the irony...). Clearly, there's no point to existence except amusement. So, here's some:

On average, each of us human beings from birth till death consume about (2000 per day x 365 days x 70 years) calories. That is a pretty big number (51,100,000 calories).Big, of course, is a relative term. The big calories translates to about 0.00002 milligrams of matter. In the scheme of things--compared to, say, the amount of matter Sun converts to pure energy per second--, the amout of matter we manage to process in 70 years is stupefyingly underwhelming. Sun converts about 4,000,000,000 kilograms of mass to pure energy every second compared to our biological knickers-in-knots process*. Still, we are here and we can point a resounding finger at the Sun. That's quite something, isn't it? Life is an extraordinarily strange and fragile business whichever way you look at it (the strangeness includes the looking-at-it part too). Perhaps, in a thousand years, we may climb up the energy ladder, sit alongside stars and have a proper material breakfast of a few hundred tons of hydrogen. It would be way more amusing than what we do with the less-than-nothing we consume today. Of course, we've got to survive to do that.

*The comparison is sort of fudged. Sun does atom crushing, we don't do that. Sun literally converts the mass to energy. OTOH, we do a lot of very very minute electrochemical energy extraction. The comparison aims to show the scale of energies involved, which differ by orders of magnitude. Physics savvy readers please pitch in and clarify my muddle if needed. Read the comments on this post...

Can We Talk About Science? I Mean, Really? [Thus Spake Zuska]

Zuska none@example.com — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:55:16 -0500

You should never, ever criticize something a New Atheist says about science and religion. Never tell them maybe it's not the best idea in the world to just go on about science/evolution + religion in whatever way, at whatever time, in whatever manner, for whatever reasons. In fact, you cannot criticize the speech of New Atheists even if your goal is not to tell them to shut up, but to suggest that they might get their message across better and more effectively if they tried delivering it in a different manner than the one they've been using, because suggestions like that are CENSORSHIP and it is telling them to SHUT UP and that is WRONG and MEAN.

If you have no idea what I am talking about just Google any of the following in combination: Mooney, Kirshenbaum, PZ Myers, Unscientific America. Be warned, it is not for the faint of heart.

On the other hand, if you are not a New Atheist, and you want to speak about Science and Religion, you might want to choose your words pretty carefully. People might question why in the world you have been allowed to blog on ScienceBlogs. They might question your scientific credentials. They might call you a word-twisting intellectually dishonest buffoon. They will offer nuanced critiques of your writing such as: pathetically wrong and mind-numbingly boring.

I am amused at the outrage caused by one of my newest Sciblings, David Sloan Wilson, who writes the blog Evolution for Everyone. The dude's not shy - he launched himself at Scienceblogs with a post on Science as a Religion that Worships Truth as its God. What's behind all the sputtering anger? I mean, this dude is not the first person ever to posit such notions. Why are everybody's knickers in such a knot? C'mon, you can't pretend that idea isn't out there and doesn't have some serious resonance. And I'm talking about more than "high school debate team" level, as one of his commenters complained. Let's review.

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Response to Dan Ariely's Duke Sex Toy Study Is Predictably Irrational [Terra Sigillata]

Abel Pharmboy none@example.com — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:02:01 -0500

Father Joe Vetter, director of Duke University's Catholic Center, is protesting trial participant accrual for a study being conducted on campus directed by Dr Dan Ariely, the James B Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics in the Fuqua School of Business (story and video). Ariely is also the author of the best-selling book, Predictably Irrational, an engaging, science-based examination of the rational and not-so-rational influences that contribute to decision-making. The new and expanded version of the book ranks #442 on Amazon.com book sales in the United States.

Look for that number to improve after the attention to Professor Ariely this weekend.

So, to what is Father Vetter objecting?

Ariely and his postdoctoral fellow, Dr Janet Schwartz, received IRB approval to recruit female study participants from the Duke campus community to examine the influence of Tupperware-like sex toy parties on sexual attitudes. A recruitment advert had been posted on the university website, as is commonly done for any clinical or social science study, ~~but was pulled yesterday following the objection of Rev Vetter.~~ Correction: Duke VP of Public Affairs Michael Schoenfeld notes in the comments below that the ads were removed after accrual was complete. Indeed, going to http://tinyurl.com/toyparty reveals that enrollment is closed.

However, here is one of the four ads:

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The illusion of time: Perceiving the effect before the cause [Neurophilosophy]

Mo none@example.com — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:50:39 -0500

A novel temporal illusion, in which the cause of an event is perceived to occur after the event itself, provides some insight into the brain mechanisms underlying conscious perception. The illusion, described in the journal Current Biology by a team of researchers from France, suggests that the unconscious representation of a visual object is processed for around one tenth of a second before it enters conscious awareness.

Chien-Te Wu and his colleagues at the Brain and Cognition Research Centre in Toulouse used a visual phenomenon called motion-induced blindness, in which a constantly rotating background causes prominent and motionless visual stimuli to disappear and reappear, as demonstrated in the video below. Fixate on the flashing green spot in the centre, and you'll notice that the surrounding yellow spots begin to disappear and reappear after about ten seconds. Then replay the clip and focus on any of the yellow spots; you'll see that it is a visual disappearance illusion. Exactly how it works is unclear; according to one hypothesis it is due to the properties of neurons in area V1 of the visual cortex.

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Friday Rant: "Militant" Atheists and Freedom From Religion [The Primate Diaries]

Eric Michael Johnson none@example.com — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:45:47 -0800

The website Atheism Exposed claims that religion is under attack and that an all out counterinsurgency campaign is needed to defend the godly:

Militant atheism should concern all believers. It is a form of fanaticism on a par with extreme religious movements. Like religious extremism it is characterized by intensity and arrogance. Like religious extremism it tears at, and ridicules opposite viewpoints. It is often aggressive, disrespectful, sarcastic, intolerant and, most of all, blasphemous. Its aim to kill faith and hope and to leave as many victims as possible with a psychological vacuum that they will fill with their empty and destructive ideas.

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Friday Sprog Blogging: getting information you can trust. [Adventures in Ethics and Science]

Janet D. Stemwedel none@example.com — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:18:33 -0500

Dr. Free-Ride: I wanted to ask you guys a question. I think maybe I asked you this question (or something like it) some time ago, but you were a lot younger and, you know, you keep growing and changing and stuff. So the question is, when someone tells you something about science, how can you tell if that person knows what they're talking about?

Younger offspring: No way.

Dr. Free-Ride: What? What do you mean, "no way"?

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On the media (or press) [Eruptions]

Erik Klemetti none@example.com — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:44:47 -0500

It seems like I've been stepping on a lot of people's toes lately, so in an effort to foster more camaraderie and less belligerence between the "old media" (this is not derogatory, but rather refers to anything pre-internet news source or classic journalistic source) and "new media" (this includes internet-era news sources, bloggers and the like), I'd like to put down my thoughts on the state of science journalism on the internet today.

I do not think all media is bad at science. There are a multitude of great science sources out there that handle the issues quite well, mostly associated with professional societies like AGU or APS or through more popular-slanted journals like Science or Nature.
I do think that science journalism (not science writing) is vital in news media and bloggers cannot fully replace - heck, I don't have time to track down and talk to all the players regarding a specific issue and that is where science journalists earn their bucks.
That being said, if you just look at an aggregator like Google News and look up a current interesting science topic, you'll find that a vast majority of sources are just not very good. Sure, there are the Live Sciences of the internet that handle the material well, but on the whole, there is a lot of misinformation being disseminated.
In my opinion, the problem is that many of these news sources are second-, third- or more-handing the news rather than looking at the primary source. This is because (a) they might not have anyone that can understand it; (b) they don't have the time to do it or (c) they don't care.
I also think that many media sources will look for the "hook" before looking for the real ramifications - this is the "eyes" problem with internet news: you need to get people's attention and fast. It started in TV news, with sensationalist coverage (Al Capone's vault anyone?) and the internet has embraced the format.
I also think the rampant antiscience sentiment in a lot of the US, combined with a lack of proper science education has promoted a generation (or more) that either (a) doesn't care about science and/or (b) doesn't understand enough to question some of these questionable sources.

So, how do we solve this?

We need to make science fascinating again. It has become so myopic in many fields - mostly thanks to the current academic structure to publish or perish. People are interested in science, just maybe not the Nd isotopes of minerals found in a specific hydrothermal pool in upper Mongolia.

We need our new Carl Sagans, Arthur C. Clarkes or Stephen Goulds - people who understand science and can advocate for it. I have trouble thinking of anyone filling those roles anymore.

We need to strength science education at all levels - and I'm not talking about standardized tests. I'm talking about teaching the scientific method and making people want to think about science and how it is done. That is what makes people interested, not memorizing the formulas for 100 minerals, but rather how they form and what that can tell us about the Earth. Science should be a hands-on event that fosters thinking rather than memorization - the current educational system in the US emphasizes the later thanks to the love of testing we now have.

We need people who understand science and have been trained to become journalists. I hate to say it, but maybe we don't need another 1,000 science Ph.D.s trying to become professors, but rather they should try to bring their love of science to the public through journalism and writing.

I think that covers a lot of what I think about the state of science journalism on and off the internet. I think the real problem is likely the deeper, societal anti-science sentiment that doesn't foster scientific thought. I also think that we've taken a lot of the wonder out of science - that sort of Victorian mentality that anything is worth pursuing because it might be interesting. The business model that only science that will have a practical end result or that will have a successful outcome has neutered a lot of the ingenuity of science. Science is about looking at the universe and thinking "this is amazing, how does it work?" and somehow we need to get back to that both in science as a discipline and society as a whole.

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Four Stone Hearth Anthropology Carnival is Up [The Primate Diaries]

Eric Michael Johnson none@example.com — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:34:29 -0800

If you're interested in anthropology on the net (or you write on the topic yourself) you're not going to want to miss this monthly carnival. Go check out this months edition at Anthropology.net. Consider submitting a post to next months carnival by clicking here. Please thank the blog hosts for a terrific edition and feel free to discuss your favorite posts in the comments section there, here, or at The Primate Diaries fan page on Facebook.

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The many faces of computer vision [Collective Imagination]

Peter Tu none@example.com — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:06:49 -0500

To date most of my postings have revolved around the application of computer vision to issues associated with security. However, we are seeing more and more uses of this technology in other domains such as entertainment and medical imaging.

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The Challenge of Eating Sustainably: College Edition [The World's Fair]

Benjamin Cohen none@example.com — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:15:00 -0500

Is It Possible to Eat Sustainably at the University of Virginia?

Eating sustainably requires (a) that you come to some resolution about what "sustainable" means, (b) that you have the opportunity to choose so-defined sustainable foods, and (c) that the constraints of your lifestyle, geography, and socioeconomic context make it possible for you to pursue such an endeavor. Threading the needle between all of that is tricky business. Thus many have chosen to run experiments about it, or related to the larger theme, defined in various ways: the "week without" processed food; the "week without" plastic; the "year" living on a local diet; the adventures of "No Impact Man." Elizabeth Kolbert reviewed books on that theme in a New Yorker essay at the end of the summer. Some students in a class I teach called "Technology, Nature, and Sustainable Agriculture" (here is the website the class made last semester) are trying it right now.

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